Kazakhstan offers help to counter world food and energy shortages
24.04.2008Almaty, Kazakhstan, April 24 – Kazakhstan called Thursday for a new form of international cooperation to deal with coming world food and energy shortages.
Opening the 7th annual Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty, President Nursultan Nazarbayev pledged that Kazakhstan could play a substantial role in ensuring future global food and energy supplies.
The Kazakh leader painted a bleak picture of the world political scene, warning that the unequal distribution of wealth in the world was provoking illegal migration, extremism and growing social tensions.
“The events of the past year make us draw conclusions, which are unfortunately not very pleasant… the deterioration in the situation in the global economy and food crisis have brought to nothing all the efforts the international community had undertaken earlier to mitigate humanitarian risks. In terms of key humanitarian performance the world has reverted to what it was 10 years ago, and achieving the UN millennium goals is becoming problematic.”
The world was again facing the challenge of separatism, which causing a real crisis in international law. “Events in Kosovo and Tibet immediately became part of the set of tools used in the global geopolitical struggle,” he said.
The leading world nations needed to take resolute action to come up with new forms of international cooperation, which could stabilise the the global economy and overcome the lack of balance in the world, the President said.
“As for Kazakhstan, we can play a substantial role in both the energy and food sectors,” he declared.
Dariga Nazbayeva, founder of the Eurasian Media Forum, said the world had undergone great changes since this annual series of conferences began in 2002 as “one of the bridges where people from all continents come together to seek consensus of compromise through dialogue.”
New centres of power were developing in the place of a system dominated by a single world power. This was not a new Cold War, as sometimes suggested by the media, but it was not without risks.
“Kosovo is a key issue,” she said. “It appears to be the most critical and sensitive challenge the world is currently facing. Many believe that it questions the whole modern global order and relationships between nations. Many both in the West and the East are still behaving as if the ‘cold war’ is not over yet.” She said
Zbigniew Brzezinski, US National Security Advisor to President Carter, said the old Cold War was altogether different from the present relationship between Russia and the West.
Subjectively, the Soviet Union and the United States had been promoting two opposing visions of the future. Objectively, the two powers had been engaged in territorial rivalry based on the threat of the use of armed force.
“It was a zero sum game between two world systems,” he said.
This confrontation ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The relationship between Russia and the United States was now on a more normal footing, even if they still resorted to threats on occasion.
“We can live with it,” Brzinski said. “It’s a very different world from the old Cold war.”
Mark Perrin de Brichambaut, Secretary General of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said he also took a positive view of the current state of international relations.
“This is a time of great opportunity,” he said. “There is no serious risk of armed conflict on a world scale, there is increasing economic inter-dependence and there is a new generation of world leaders.”
A process of readjustment in relative positions was underway in international relations, but this should not be seen as too dramatic.
“What is important is what comes after, how we work for the future.”
Brichambaut said every country now had the opportunity to help solve current international and regional problems, such as failed states and drug trafficking.
“This is the real competition, how well can each nation work and relate together in an inter-connected world.”
Mark McKinnon of Canada’s Globe and Mail, said rivalry between East and West was back again, but in a new form, fuelled by separatist issues such as the status of Kosovo.
“We are still looking at rivalry based on different visions of the world,” he said.
The difference was that in the first Kosovo crisis in the 1990s, the United States could dictate its policy to Russia. That was no longer the case, as the world had moved towards a multi-polar system of international relations.
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